Federal prosecutions not easy in police shootings

ERIC TUCKERAssociated Press Published: August 27, 2014 3:00 AM

WASHINGTON (AP) -- As the Justice Department probes the police shooting of an unarmed 18-year-old in Missouri, history suggests there's no guarantee of a criminal prosecution, let alone a conviction.

Federal authorities investigating possible civil rights violations in the Aug. 9 death of Michael Brown in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson must meet a difficult standard of proof, a challenge that has complicated the path to prosecution in past police shootings.

To build a case, they would need to establish that the police officer, Darren Wilson, not only acted with excessive force but also willfully violated Brown's constitutional rights. Though the Justice Department has a long history of targeting police misconduct, including after the 1991 beating of Rodney King, the high bar means that many high-profile police shootings that have raised public alarm never wound up in federal court.

"It's a very difficult standard to meet, and it really is satisfied only in the most egregious cases," said University of Michigan law professor Samuel Bagenstos, the former No. 2 official in the department's civil rights division. "Criminal enforcement of constitutional rights is not something that is easily pursued. It really requires building a case very carefully, very painstakingly."

In the Brown case, much will depend on the specific facts of the confrontation, which remain unclear.

Investigators are working with a federal law that makes it illegal for officers to abuse their power by willfully depriving a person of his civil rights -- in this case, the right to be free from an unlawful search and seizure. The statute does not require an officer to have been motivated by racial bias, but it does mean that the officer cannot intentionally do something that he knows is against the law.